How do we explain the phenomenon of more than 11,000 non-Syrian “volunteers” fighting in the Syrian ‘civil war’ (New York Times, Feb. 1, 2014, p. A7)? Some of those who have traveled to Syria to join in the struggle come from as far away as Indonesia, and knew virtually nothing of Syria or its conflicts before arriving there. Before analyzing the motivations of men traveling half way around the world to engage in a struggle not their own, we should pause to ponder, and then discard, the phrase “civil war.” There is no such thing. The Syrian struggle to overthrow Assad has gone on for more than three years, forced millions of people into squalid camps in Jordan, Turkey and Lebanon, and led to widespread and documented crimes against civilians in which chemical weapons were deployed. There is nothing civil about the conflict. One of the sides is not wearing a uniform. That doesn’t make the war civil or restrained. The Syrian Revolution has provoked the anguish of millions around the globe but is hardly any closer to resolution, in part due to a stalemate between a newly resurgent Russia and the bumbling, inconsistent foreign policy of the US. In this sorry episode of neglect and failure to act, let us not miss the existence of thousands of volunteers who have swarmed to a conflict in which they had no part. It is in conflicts like these where the constitutionally violent of every generation assemble to do death to others. They endure great hardship and are prepared to sacrifice their lives for a cause that is not their own. Some will not survive, and others will be crippled and scarred for life by fighting in Syria. Many of the Indonesian volunteers are Sunni Moslems who have heard of atrocities against Sunnis in Syria. Yet it seems hardly likely that isolated acts against a Moslem minority would justify volunteering to die in a war thousands of miles away from one’s home. No, we must look deeper into human bloodlust to find the reasons for these actions. It may well be that we have permitted a small percentage of men and women to believe that elective violence is acceptable during some part of their youth and that killing others in the service of some ideal or cause is a correct way of growing up. We have nurtured and exploited violence in films, videos and books which show an endless cavalcade of explosions and shootings – all in the service of some cause that is deemed by the makers of those entertainments as worthwhile. That ocean of violent images and acts grounds and inspires thousands of elective warriors who serve in no army. These men and women materialize from all over the globe, hungry for blood, zealous in their cause, and eager to deal out death to others. These people ask only“where’s the fight?” not what the fight is about or whether the side they have chosen has any reason to be fighting. It is not enough for us to see this and think of it as an isolated phenomenon. It is not. We see the young focused more on violence and killing in the hours they spend watching television and playing video games than on celebrating peace and humility in mosques. Instead of channeling the energy and drive of the young into the building of schools and roads, we lead them to believe that it is acceptable to engage in making war. Their cause is only a flimsy excuse for involvement in a conflict which they little understand. We should ask ourselves what role we have had in allowing these people to believe that their conduct is any way rational and acceptable.

Today another 20 children will be shot by guns. Many of the shootings will not be intentional and some of those children will not be the intended recipients of gunfire, but instead will be incidental targets. Many of those children will be shot by other children. None of those distinctions will be of any comfort to the grieving families and classmates.Somewhere in the media today the NRA will thunder about the Second Amendment rights of its members, as the hearse slowly moves through the streets a few miles away. Their "rights" to own firearms do not mean they can handle them irresponsibly. Few people possess guns for necessity; most of the gun owners assert that shooting is a sport and a passion. So in the name of sports, we put our children and our neighbors at risk.There are really only two reasons for having a pistol: sport shooting and hurting people. Let's not get lost in the rhetoric of hunting as a sport. There may be some validity to viewing hunting as a type of sport, but pistols are not for shooting deer or quail. Pistols are for shooting people, and target practice is for being ready to shoot people. Pistol packing homeowners are not required to use gun safes in their homes, and most do not do so.Controlled experiments have shown that young children are fascinated with guns, know where they are "hidden" in the house, and will play with guns even when they have been repeatedly told not to do so. The ABC Twenty-twenty presentation by Diane Sawyer on February 1, 2014 illustrates that tendency very readily, to the shock of most of the gun owning parents filmed in the show.So children will take guns to school, show them to their friends, play "cops and robbers," carry them in their backpacks, and dad and mom will assert that they are responsible gun owners. Maybe they are, but their children are not. They can't be. They are seven years old.As parents and as decent, caring people we should never let our children enter a house where guns are not in a gun safe, even if we are with them. We are in an avalanche of gun violence in this country, and we must start being more vigilant to protect our kids. Then we have to start protecting ourselves from wild gunfire. Gun owners, your "sport" is putting my children's lives at risk.

Author

L.Craig Williams, BA, JD, has studied history and international law in Germany and the US and written extensively about human resources and individual leadership. He believes that all occupations and intellectual effort should be focused on the betterment of the human condition.